


Love Like Other Things

by lettered



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-28
Updated: 2011-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/lettered





	Love Like Other Things

She outgrew love like other things: home and flowers blown, fruit fallen from the vine. Winter came and laid its blanket down. Six seeds within her pulled her underground, with stones.

Fingernails still grow after death, and her skin grew white within those walls. Tresses, lips and lashes grew black with fungus. Like decay, she grew into a queen, all her flowers gone.

Underneath, grain and home curled in sleep. They did not disturb her now, like other things.

She never grew to love him.

Spring came, like other things: fruit and flowers, cereal and chaff. That summer was the first time she heard Orpheus sing. His hair was as bright as a chariot; his mouth was red like fruit. His song sang of earlier days, before the fruit, before the fall.

Persephone looked away. On her knees, she had eaten the seeds, and now she knew. Above the ground was the tomb of childish things. There was no going there again, her belly ripe with rot. She was looking forward to the fall.

That winter, another girl got gone, her eyes gaping and gilded. Persephone professed disinterest (Eurydice was not the first to run away from home), until Orpheus followed to disinter her.

From the first meeting, her husband hated him. Orpheus’s hair and harp sang of spring and other things, when Persephone was bright and prospered still, a blossom. In his efforts to exhume his wife, Orpheus excavated her husband even farther down, dug him right down to the root when there had never been a flower. There there was the seed of a man—resentful, jealous and alone, sick for homes he never had. Orpheus’s eyes were the color of Hades’s brothers’ houses.

"He cast me out," said Hades. "Is this my kingdom? Is this my home?"

“That’s all behind us,” Persephone told her husband. “Now we are grown up.”

Hades never could deny her but one thing.

He let Orpheus go up with but one command, the thing that his wife had told him about going forward. Orpheus disobeyed, and the punishment was that he should grow up and forget her there, the green girl in a cave. She wore the price in her eyes that he paid with his heart.

Underground, Persephone reached from her throne to cup the young girl’s cheek. Her hand was thin and pale like bone, her nails sharp as briars. The girl’s cheek was petal-soft, warm with life and surface-thoughts. Her mouth—trembling, longing, lost—was as ripe as Orpheus’s, full before the rot. The flesh of fruit used to taste like home.

In the Underworld, compassion tasted like ash, distant and quite empty. “It will pass,” Persephone told the child. “We outgrow love, like other things.”


End file.
